Under which conditions is it advantageous for countries to form a single payments area? This question is analyzed in a model of spatial bank competition to understand better the economic foundations of the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA). An economic research perspective on the mostly informal...

This FIW Special International Economics takes a long term perspective on international merchandise trade and tracks specialisation patterns of 19 world regions over the period 1980 to 2009. The data reveals that the path of trade specialisation is not predetermined: globalisation may intensify...

We analyse the dynamics of the standard deviation of demand shocks and of the demand component of GDP across countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU). This analysis allows us to evaluate the patterns of cyclical comovement in EMU and put them in contrast to the cyclical performance of the...

We propose the analysis of the dynamics of the standard deviation of business cycles across euro area countries in order to evaluate the patterns of cyclical convergence in the European Monetary Union for the period 1960-2008. We identify significant business cycle divergence taking place in the...

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...

We analyse a world consisting of ’the North’ and ’the South’ where labour standards in the North are set by trade unions. Standards set by unions tend to increase output and welfare. There are no unions in the South and work standards are suboptimal. Trade between these two countries can...

Employing the Pedroni co-integration technique and the GMM estimator, this paper aims at investigating the possible connection between financial development, financial openness and trade openness in twenty-nine Asian developing countries over 1994-2008. Firstly, we find a bidirectional causality...

This paper deals with firms’ decision related to international activities in a twocountry oligopoly model with a homogeneous product and unionized labor markets. Using a three-stage non-cooperative game with firms being first movers, it is found that firms’ strategies are affected by the...

What goods to export and where to sell them? Our research was pursuing these two major goals. The first one is related to detecting countries where Austria has good perspectives for boosting its export. The basic idea was to use macroeconomic data set detecting the significant variables. We...

The theoretical claim that ethnic networks encourage trade has found broad empirical support in the literature on migration, business networks and international trade. Ethnic networks matter for the exporting firm, as they exhibit the potential to lower fixed and variable cost of exporting. This...